The cost of old age
 

Getting old is an expensive business. I trail clouds of doctors behind me, all of whom have to be paid occasionally very large fees. I have, or have had recently, a general practitioner, a cardiologist, a gerontologist, a nephrologist, a respiratory physician, a neurosurgeon, a gastroenterologist, an ENT doctor, a dentist and an optician. I also spend more on pills and potions at the chemist than I ever do on beauty products – that’s pretty obvious – and the only reason the hairdresser hasn’t sent me bankrupt (apart from COVID) is what has proven in retrospect to be a fine choice not to dye my hair and stay grey.

Because for me getting old included getting fat, I’ve also spent small fortunes on new clothes, despite purchasing them from – as I’ve said before – less than high class stores. I am very acquisitive when it comes to cheap clothes and have done some COVID shopping on-line. So I now have racks of very large shirts which I can wear and other racks with very small shirts which I can’t. The fact that I can’t go out wearing my nice new shirts is a problem; on the day lockdown ends I shall emerge as a (fat) butterfly from my COVID chrysalis and model my purchases outside.

I shall, of course, have to buy new earrings to match my new shirts; since I had my ears pierced at the age of 72 I’ve been purchasing new earrings from market stalls and car boot sales and anticipate continuing on this course as the sort of jewellery I purchase is not ruinously expensive. And because buying new earrings is FUN!

My other expenses are my hobbies, indulged in far more now I’ve retired. I patchwork (expensive fabric and classes), embroider (expensive kits) and have projects on the go in needlepoint, creative stitching (very expensive), basket weaving and knitting (not so expensive). The cancellation this year of the Craft and Quilt show has saved me hundreds of dollars but denied me the pleasure of wandering around for an entire day and visiting a kaleidoscope of stalls with fabrics, buttons, embroidery threads, needlepoint and embroidery kits and more fabrics!

Let me talk some more about fabric. There’s a saying I’ve heard from patchworkers: “She who dies with the most fabric wins”. Your collection of fabrics is called your stash and is principally made up of “fat quarters”, quarter-metre fabric lengths cut in a particular way, not cut across the bolt from selvage to selvage. (The selvage is the “self-edge” where the fabric is gripped by the machine used in its manufacture). Patchwork shops from all around the country have stalls at the craft fair with boxes full of fat quarters standing on edge – a cornucopia of colours and patterns and utterly irresistible.

Apart from fabric, my other collecting passion is threads of all different types, colours and textures. I have boxes of them, stored in what originated I believe as tackle boxes for fishermen – plastic boxes divided internally into small cubes.

Other expenses associated with increasing age are book purchases. Since I’ve owned a Kindle I’ve bought literally hundreds of books this way and I also buy “real” books from time to time. Given my difficulty in remembering what I’ve read, you would imagine I’d stick with the same books and read them over and over. But the stunning variety of books available to you on a Kindle is as enticing as buying fat quarters from the craft show.

Fortunately, I have no interest in bling so my spending isn’t in jewellery shops. Nor is it for multiple-thousand dollar shoes or handbags and certainly not for the even greater expense of couture clothes.

I am perfectly comfortable in my Katies shirts reading my Kindle books or doing my embroidery or patchwork and glad I still have the eyesight to do it all.

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations: Mahatma Gandhi, when asked what he thought of western civilisation: “I think it would be a good idea.”

 

Word wonderment

 

In cleaning up my desk the other day, I found a scrap of paper on which I’d written three words – mimesis, semiosis and synecdoche – as you do. They were words I’d come across more than once and didn’t know their meaning. Now, I love words. I’ve been reading virtually non-stop since I was four so I’ve accumulated a lot of them. I possess several dictionaries and use them frequently to find out the meaning of words and their pronunciation, particularly the shorter Oxford in a book and the absolutely enormous Oxford online. So I’ve looked up the meanings of my three words and lay them out here for your delectation!

Mimesis:

 *The way in which the real world and human behaviour is represented in art or literature.

*The fact of a particular social group changing their behaviour by copying the behaviour of another social group.

*In biology the fact of a plant or animal developing a similar appearance to another plant or animal

*In medicine the fact of a set of symptoms suggesting that somebody has a particular disease, when in fact that person has a different disease or none

Semiosis

The study of signs and symbols and of their meaning and use. (This sounds approachable, but if you look up semiotics you find a spew of words illustrating an idea which for me is incomprehensible including the difference between semiotics and semantics. I wish you better luck in working it out!)

Synecdoche

A word or phrase in which a part of something is used to represent a whole, or a whole is used to represent a part of something. For example, in “Australia lost by two goals”, Australia here is used to represent the Australian team.

By the way, the second point under mimesis (which the Oxford tells me can be pronounced mi-mesis or mai-mesis) makes a lot of sense. It’s precisely what Jews in Australia’s early European history did to become accepted. Jews became seen as ordinary people who just went to church on Saturdays (the word synagogue was a bridge too far). Provided they didn’t frighten the horses they did just fine. The Jewish “gentry” of The Great Synagogue with their top hats and frock coats epitomised this mimesis.

A word which came my way recently and which I love and have since used is gallimaufry. A peculiar word but with a simple meaning: a heterogeneous mixture; a jumble or medley.

When I was growing up, the longest word in the dictionary was antidisestablishmentarianism which is opposition to a breaking away from an established church. Antidisestablishmentarianism is used to specifically refer to people who opposed withdrawing support of the Anglican Church of England during the 1800s. I just sense you need to know this.

Today it’s pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, a technical word referring to the lung disease more commonly known as silicosis. Try slipping that into a conversation …

And then there’s the fraught issue of pronunciation – not pronOUNciation, dear. Australians don’t work hard at getting the pronunciation right. Just take the fact that a football team called the Maroons is pronounced Mar-OWNS, or that lots of people still call the cinema the pitchers.

For the absolutely final word on pronunciation, I bring to you the totally fabulous song from My Fair Lady, written by Alan Jay Lerner, where Professor Henry Higgins had this wonderful spew.

Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?

This verbal class distinction, by now,

Should be antique. If you spoke as she does, sir,

Instead of the way you do,

Why, you might be selling flowers, too!

Hear a Yorkshireman, or worse,

Hear a Cornishman converse,

I'd rather hear a choir singing flat.

Chickens cackling in a barn Just like this one!

Garn! I ask you, sir, what sort of word is that?

It's "Aoooow" and "Garn" that keep her in her place.

Not her wretched clothes and dirty face.

An Englishman's way of speaking absolutely classifies him,

The moment he talks he makes some other

Englishman despise him.

One common language I'm afraid we'll never get.

Oh, why can't the English learn to set

A good example to people whose

English is painful to your ears?

The Scotch and the Irish leave you close to tears.

There even are places where English completely

Disappears. In America, they haven't used it for years!

Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?

Norwegians learn Norwegian; the Greeks have taught their

Greek. In France every Frenchman knows

His language from "A" to "Zed"

The French never care what they do, actually,

As long as they pronounce in properly.

Arabians learn Arabian with the speed of summer lightning.

And Hebrews learn it backwards,

Which is absolutely frightening.

But use proper English you're regarded as a freak.

Oh, why can't the English learn to speak?

 

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

British lawyer Lord Denning: “When a diplomat says yes, he means perhaps. When he says perhaps, he means no. When he says no, he is not a diplomat. When a lady says no, she means perhaps. When she says perhaps, she means yes. But when she says yes, she is no lady.” (Based on a possibly apocryphal saying of Bismark’s)

 

 

 

 

 Mulligatawny soup

 

I have never eaten Mulligatawny soup but it is the most wonderful word. Apparently, it’s a rich beef or chicken soup seasoned with curry and associated with the Raj. The fact that British people often “go out for a curry” where we might have Chinese or Italian is presumably also a consequence of the Raj. Paisley is another thing we can associate with the East (east of Britain that is). Apparently, although the pine-cone or almond-like form is of Persian origin, and the textile designs cramming many of them into a rich pattern are originally Indian, the English name for the patterns derives from the town of Paisley in the west of Scotland, a centre for textiles where paisley designs were produced. And another factoid: In novels about the Raj, the British characters often ask for “the other half” meaning another drink.

It’s interesting that many cultures have given their cuisines to the world but that some haven’t contributed much. Estonian cuisine doesn’t come to mind, for instance, or Latvian, or Lithuanian. I don’t know much about Swedish food, or Danish (except for herring), or Norwegian or Icelandic or Finnish, yet yards of bookshop space goes to Italian, French, Chinese and Japanese cookbooks. Of course, this could be just a reflection of Australia’s culinary tastes. Perhaps other countries have different cookbook preferences. The multitude of African countries, for example, must have notable cuisines over and above the food of their colonial powers.

I have dozens of cookbooks which I’ve collected since the ‘70s, all purchased in the vain endeavour to improve my cooking. As I’ve said before, my mother wasn’t particularly interested in cooking and my grandmother only made two things that I can recall: the abominable kasha or buckwheat, which could win the Stink Olympics and an actually-quite-nice honey cake for the Jewish New Year which she called, mysteriously, “ginger cake”. I went from my parents’ home to my husband’s home with no living alone in between, so my repertoire of recipes at marriage was, well, meagre. Hence the cookbook frenzy. I started with the Women’s Weekly recipes which I cut out and put into scrap-style books. Then I purchased the Woman’s Weekly cookbooks and eventually branched out to cookbooks of European cuisines, particularly Italian. For instance, I have two cookbooks of the wonderful Claudia Roden, one specifically Italian and the other generalised Mediterranean. I was also given by my spouse, undoubtedly to make a point about my cooking skills, a beautifully produced set of cookbooks published by TimeLife which consisted of four wonderfully illustrated books each supported by a more robust text-only recipe collection. They were The Cooking of Provincial France, The Cooking of Vienna’s Empire, The Cooking of Italy and American Cooking.

On marriage, I was given the famous English Constance Spry Cookbook, all 1235 pages of it, with recipes for all necessities. As 97% of the recipes were outside my interests or ability, and many of them were of the “first catch your turtle” variety I can’t say I consulted it often. I was also given Florence Greenberg’s Cookery Book stuffed to the brim with kosher recipes of the British persuasion including one for Oophlaifers or Fingerhuetchen which are apparently “thimble noodles” (no, I never tried these, tempting though the name was). It was Florence whom my mother and I went to for Pesach baking recipes like almond macaroons and coconut pyramids. For those who don’t know, on Pesach (Passover) you can’t use wheat products so significant research needs to go into substitutes like almond meal and “matza flour” which is ground up matzot (plural of matza, but you can say matzas if it comes more trippingly off the tongue!). And matzot are the sheets of unleavened bread which substitute for bread on the eight days of Pesach. Interestingly, the constrictions on cooking during Pesach have produced some wonderful foods. As well as the biscuits mentioned above there are the utterly wonderful k’neidlach or matza dumplings which you have in chicken soup and lokshen pudding; lokshen are flat noodles like tagliatelle. For the pudding they are cooked and mixed with a variety of sweet things including stewed apple and baked in the oven.

When I turned 50 I decided to buy myself the then newly-published the cook’s companion by Stephanie Alexander. (I also joined the Labor Party as another birthday present to myself, but that’s a story for another day!) Alexander’s book was then very expensive, but it’s an absolutely wonderful compilation of recipes plus much wisdom on technique, kitchen gadgets and ingredients. I have no idea what the newest-best-thing is on the cookbook front but I would recommend Alexander’s book to everyone.

Some recipe books are wonderful for the stories they tell. I had one on mediaeval cooking, for instance which taught me much about mediaeval life but presented a set of recipes which I would never use. There are also some books in the kitchen cupboard which evolved from endearing TV shows like the Two Fat Ladies, or books from Jamie Oliver's oeuvre or that of the delightful Nigella Lawson. I have a number of modern Jewish cookbooks including the Monday Morning Cooking Club publications, written by a group of young Jewish women in Sydney who have compiled recipes from their older relatives and brought them up to date. Victorian broadcaster Ramona Koval has also published a Jewish cookbook. My favourite book in this genre is The Cookbook of the Jews of Greece. Not only are the recipes fascinating, they reflect the fact that the Jews of Greece were/are an amalgam of Sephardi Jews (Spanish origin including the Jews of various Greek islands like Rhodes and of Turkey), Ashkenazi Jews (those from other parts of Europe and into Russia) and Romaniote Jews (those whose ancestry dates from the ancient Graeco-Roman word). I knew nothing about this sub-culture of Judaism but I’m now much better informed.

 

Quote of the week from the Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

From what I think is the funniest comedy sketch ever written: the Dead Parrot Sketch where the John Cleese character tries to return to the pet shop the dead parrot which he unwittingly purchased there: “It’s not pining, it’s passed on. This parrot is no more. It’s ceased to be. It’s expired. It’s gone to meet its maker. This is a late parrot. It’s a stiff. Bereft of life, it rests in peace. It would be pushing up the daisies if you hadn’t nailed it to the perch. It’s rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. It’s an ex-parrot.”

 A blessing on your head

 

Judaism is replete with blessings. You begin saying them when you wake up and continue throughout the day. The morning service, along with the afternoon and evening services mandated for Jewish men, (yes, I know! It actually gets worse: see below) contains a number of them, from blessing the Almighty for commanding them to wash their hands and for having “formed man in wisdom” (I rather think, hope, this one means humankind). The blessings follow a formula which begins “Blessed are You (or “art” you in my ancient Siddur or Prayer Book), O Lord our God, Ruler of the Universe …”

In the morning service the Almighty is thanked for, inter alia, “giving to the cock intelligence to distinguish between day and night”. The Lord is thanked also for not making the reader a heathen, for not making him a slave and for not making him a woman … yes, I know! The woman thanks the Almighty for making her “according to thy will”. The blessings continue with both sexes permitted to say them. They include thanking the Almighty for clothing the naked, opening the eyes of the blind, loosening “them that are bound”, raising them that are bowed down and giving strength to the weary, with others rather more obscure.

As you leaf through a Siddur (prayer book) there are blessings on almost every page, some to our eyes strange, others remote, others thoughtful like this one: “Blessed art thou, O Lord … unto whom it is becoming to give thanks”. And tucked toward the back are a flock of them: thanking the Almighty “for creating various kinds of foods” with more specific words for after drinking wine, eating grapes, figs, olives, pomegranates or dates. On “partaking of flesh, fish, eggs, cheese etc. or drinking any liquor except wine” (which has its own special blessing), for creating fragrant woods, odorous plants, giving a goodly scent to fruits, creating different kinds of spices (“divers” in my Siddur which was a Batmitzvah present to me in 1963 from my Grandmother and printed the year before in England). There are blessings on seeing lightning, falling stars, lofty mountains and great deserts, on hearing thunder, at the sight of the sea, on seeing beautiful trees or animals, on seeing a rainbow, on seeing trees blossoming for the first time in a year, on seeing “a Sage distinguished for his knowledge of the Law” and, by contrast, “on seeing wise men distinguished for other than sacred knowledge”. (That’s one to pop into your briefcase should you ever be meeting Dr Karl.)

There’s one blessing “on seeing a King and his court” (I wouldn’t take this one to Canberra myself, but it’s your choice) and another which is my personal favourite, to be said on seeing “strangely formed persons such as giants or dwarfs”: “Blessed art thou O Lord our God who variest the forms of thy creatures.” There’s one on tasting the first fruits of the season, entering into possession of a new house or land or on using “new raiment” (clothes to most of us). And inevitably there’s one you say on hearing “good tidings” and one on hearing “evil tidings”. Put together, I think they form a kind of Jewish Mindfulness because they remind you to notice what’s around you and give thanks for it. So, do I do any of this blessing? I’m more than a little belief challenged so no, other than those which form part of services at home or in the Synagogue.

A word about the name of God. We can’t say it. Only the High Priest in the Temple in ancient Jerusalem could say it, once a year on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. With the destruction of the Temple in 70CE, pseudonyms were introduced. When I grew up we used Adonai, Lord in English, and often just plain God. There’s a strong and to my mind wrong-headed trend now to not use either of these (or if you have to use God you spell it G-d) but to use the expression HaShem, the Name. It’s not the only time in Judaism that something is cocooned by layers and layers of meaning so the more precise word is never used. For example, Jewish rabbinic teaching explicates the law and adds layers of meaning and interpretation to the text of the Torah, the Five Books of Moses; many rabbis have called this a “fence around the Torah”. I cannot bring myself to use HaShem so I use the word Almighty. And a note on the Christian word Yahweh. We know that the sacred name of God was made of four Hebrew letters; we call it the Tetragrammaton, from the Greek. The letters are Yad, Hey, Vav, Hey, so you can see where Yahweh or Jehovah came from. But as we don’t know the vowels, we don’t know how to pronounce the sacred name so Jews stick to euphemisms.

As I mentioned above, in my generation of English/Australian Jews, the word God was familiar. Outside the synagogue we used it as a mantra in a form of the words “God Bless” being run together as something like “Gobless”. My family still says “Bye Gobless” at the end of a phone call or a visit (remember those … when the family got together!).

Even for a challenged believer, Judaism is a wondrous collection of ideas, some very few obnoxious but most admirable. Which brings me finally to the little couplet written it’s believed by English journalist and poet William Norman Ewer: “How odd of God, to choose the Jews”. Needless to say, it drew some endearing ripostes, but for these you need to know that the word Goyim in Hebrew means non-Jews. So the humourist Leo Rosten came back with: “Not odd of God, Goyim annoy ‘im”. Another, possibly by Ogden Nash went: “But not so odd, as those who choose a Jewish God, yet spurn the Jews.” An anonymous reply was “Not so odd, the Jews chose God”. And finally, the US author and journalist Jim Sleeper penned this one: Moses, Jesus, Marx, Einstein and Freud, no wonder the Goyim are annoyed.”

 

Quote of the week from the Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations: US comedian W. C. Fields during his last illness: “I have spent a lot of time searching through the Bible for loopholes.”

And as a special treat, some doggerel with a great deal of charm: “Roses are reddish, violets are bluish, if it wasn’t for Christmas, we’d all be Jewish!”

 On the windowsill

 

At the It Shall Be Nameless department store in Warriewood Square there are aisles after aisles of the most attractive household goods designed to entice you into stylish tidiness by having remarkably low prices.

As I wander, trolley and credit card in hand, I dream of how charming I could make my shelves, tables and windowsills with small expenditure.

But I have a long way to go.

Take my kitchen windowsill for instance. Although my current windowsill is cluttered, it is nothing compared to the very long windowsill in our Mona Vale house. One morning I noted down that it held: a humorous card from an ancient birthday, a paper napkin holder with a few stray napkins, a large thermometer, a small scented candle, a very small button, a handmade cloth mouse, a pot full of drooping rosemary, one large elastic band, assorted screws, nails and washers, an empty bottle of vanilla extract, a pretty bottle of hand cream relatively unused (if you saw my hands this would become clear), several sizes of coinage for undoing bits of my vacuum cleaner, a recipe cut from a packet and a lovely box decorated by an Aboriginal artist and used for keeping baby teeth. And I forgot – two crystals and a baby nappy pin. Considering we didn’t use cloth nappies in the house, this last is most mysterious.

I recall that my open pantry shelves in Mona Vale presented a problem when my then one-year-old youngest grandchild came to be looked after by grandma. He barrelled around the house training for the crawler Olympics and if I didn’t race around in front of him shutting doors he would have rows of books on the floor together with the objects d'art I thoughtfully placed here and there when we moved in.

The just seven-year-old who lives here and the almost eight-year-old who came (pre Covid) some weekday afternoons are also talented mess-makers. The older two – nine and 12 respectively, with the 12-year-old in residence – are happy playing chess, Scrabble and Monopoly after school all at once and all on the floor, so clearing up after them is a major exercise. To be fair, their principle after-school pleasure is jumping on the trampoline or playing inside my car; equally frequently they climb onto the roof of the car and chat away up there. I recall the now seven-year-old decided when he was three to climb up also; he had somehow made it up to the bonnet and was attempting the Everest of the car's roof when discovered.

But I digress. I fear that tidy, elegant, stylish and such like words will never be applied to my place while five grandchildren wander at will. And that's just fine with me.

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

“Inspiration is the act of drawing up a chair to the writing desk.” Anon.

 The Night of the Space Alien

 

A space alien has made land-fall – or should that be planet-fall – at our house on the hill and she is not a pretty sight. She used to be a grumpy grandma but now she’s condemned to a breathing mask at night she looks, not to put too fine a point on it, ridiculous. Just as the knee bone’s connected to the thigh bone and the thigh bone’s connected to the hip bone, so is the breathing mask connected to a hose which is connected to a machine which is connected to a water reservoir and the whole box and dice helps me to breathe properly in the wee small hours.

As is frequently the case, when you’re diagnosed with some ailment or disease or the like, you immediately hear about lots of others who’d been suffering from the disease for years. Thus many of you out there will have correctly diagnosed Sleep Apnoea– in my case Severe Sleep Apnoea. It’s so new in my life I had to double-check how to spell it. Should the breathing apparatus work – and there’s every chance it will – I may regain some of my rapidly depleting memory as well as my good humour; the grandchildren will be happy about that. It may also help me lose weight (some chemical does something or another when you’re not getting enough oxygen overnight which leads to accumulating avoirdupois).

Back to grumpiness and the grandchildren for a moment. Most of you know that the schools in Sydney are closed. For I think it’s been five weeks now, I’ve been the principal of “Grandma School”; pupil numbers – one seven-year-old with ants in his pants. The more wriggly he gets the grumpier I am. There’s also, as I’ve mentioned before, the new words and ways in which children these days are taught. So when I write additions in the old-fashioned way with one number underneath another and a dear little plus sign to one side, I feel like I’m being very naughty. However, this too shall pass, although I think there’s a good chance there will be no more school this term.

“I have measured out my life with coffee spoons,” wrote T. S. Eliot in The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock. For close to 50 years, I measured my life in speeding bullets. Now I've retired into full-time grandmotherhood, I still can't measure my life in slow, small spoonfulls. In some ways it's still hectic, but it is measured differently. For instance, my day could be broken up into the time between kitchen duties, largely washing up, the need for which occurs as regularly as a metronome's tick. Then there's the time, in happier days, between taking grandchildren to school in the morning and picking them up in the afternoon.

When some of the five grandchildren were still at kindie, these trips need to be planned with my daughter and daughter-in-law with military precision. For example, on Mondays I took one grandchild to school in the morning but picked up two in the afternoon. I took one small fellow to kindie in the morning, but most days he was picked up by mum. Alternatively, that mum sometimes picked up the middle child of the other mum (my daughter-in-law) as she passed HER kindie on the way back from work (before the era of work-from-home). Some days I looked after the smallest fellow and other days his older sister. Now with just one of the five not yet at school the permutations and combinations are likely to be endless if school and after-school activities ever return.

Another way my time is measured is the time between laundry loads. As most of you know, I live with my daughter, her partner and two of the grandchildren and the two boys generate an enormous amount of washing. But as Parkinson's Law has it, “work expands to fill the time available for its completion”. In these retirement days – well, retirement from paid employment – I have more time, so inevitably my washload increased. Pre COVID, I soaked the filthy school white shirts while pondering why schools insist on white shirts; black would surely be more reasonable. I spend a great deal of time folding the washing for both boys as they tend to put everything in the dirty washing basket including clothes they took from their wardrobes, changed their minds about wearing and threw into the basket.

However I’ve recently decided that the time between my current state of occasional forgetfulness and the final curtain is not going to be just housework. I’ve decided to write this blog, learn Italian, achieve an MPhil or a PhD and have a local gallery fancy my artwork. All of which has made me finally understand the marvellous words of the poet Dylan Thomas:

“Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

Aristocratic old lady to police officer inquiring into the murder of Lord Lucan’s nanny, 1974.

“Oh dear, what a pity. Nannies are so hard to come by these days.”

 

 Snail mail

 

We have a new resident in our house on the plateau, a bearded dragon called Haku. As my daughter’s partner’s mum (you’ll be able to work it out) owns a large snake, I suppose I can count myself lucky that our reptile is only a lizard. It’s about a foot and a half long, most of it tail, and coloured tan and whitish; its beard is not very noticeable. Apart from its overall reptile creepiness, the oddest thing about it is two holes, one on each side of its head, which are apparently how it hears. But as I got this information from a five-year-old I’m not entirely sure of its veracity.

I have had a loathing for reptiles, particularly snakes, since childhood. In those days, I spent a lot of time roaming through a wonderful 1947 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica which devoted an entire page to coloured pictures of world snakes. I would turn this page by holding it by the tiniest bit of its edge, as if the images might wake up and see me off. And I’ve told you before about the blue-tongued lizard in our garden in Pymble with its hateful flickering blue tongue which kept me in the house for weeks.

The closest I ever came to real live snakes in the wild was the archaeological dig I went on at the end of my first year at university. Our dig was at a large rock shelter in the national park south of Sydney and we established a campsite there living in eight-person army tents. (I became completely adept at dressing and undressing inside a sleeping bag, a skill I have regrettably not needed again!) We were surrounded by bush which was quite dense in the height of summer. Our route from the tents to the rock shelter up the hill was reasonably clear, but there was bush around us elsewhere so trips to the latrine, which we dug ourselves, were somewhat fraught with danger. These trips, by the way, included our carrying with us massive containers, one full of creosote and other of lavender water, to sanitise the trenches. But it was trips through rather dense bush to other smaller rock shelters around us that was the most fraught with potential danger. Fortunately one of the blokes on the dig reassured me that the snakes were more afraid of me than I was of them and as long as I trampled loudly as I progressed and always stepped onto logs and not over them (snakes liked sunning themselves on the tracks) I would be safe. He was right. While I never conquered my fear I was at least able to march through the bush without screeching.

My other confrontation with reptiles occurred in New Guinea where I had gone in the 1960s with a university group to study the elections as New Guinea hauled itself into the modern world. Our small sub-group of four from Sydney University were sent to Rabaul, a lovely town then but tragically much later destroyed by volcanic eruption. We lived in the Methodist Mission – the reason for which escapes me – and we developed a nodding relationship with rather sweet little geckoes. They would climb the walls to the ceiling at night-time and need the warmth of the morning sun to start moving again. I didn’t love them, but they were reasonably inoffensive.

The reason I’ve called this blog Snail Mail, however, is because we have snails which live in our mailbox. Ok, I know snails aren’t reptiles, but I think they have the same level of creepiness and when you put your hand in to collect the mail there’s a very good chance you’ll fish out a snail too. And the snails appear to love paper. If you don’t take out your mail every day or so then there won’t be much of it left.

So here I am in my dotage being required to live in close proximity to a reptile. Along with the snails, the dog, the cockatoos, the kookaburras, the lorikeets, the pantry moths and the granddaddy cockroaches, I’ve really got more wildlife than I care for.

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

General Charles De Gaulle: “How can you govern a country which produces 246 different kinds of cheese?”